All four of them stare at me in awe.
“We have to go back for him,” I say. To save the Zodiac, we have to save Ophiuchus.
28
I SPEND THE REST OF the day repeating everything I learned from both Ophiuchus and Aquarius over and over and over again.
Hysan creates a fake hologram of Imogen to field any incoming calls from Blaze or Aquarius. Funny how identity forgery used to be our greatest threat, and now it’s a survival strategy. The five of us spend the rest of the day in meetings with the Zodai teams on Phaet, and the other Guardians drop in holographically at various times, until everyone has been filled in.
The plan is for a small team to fly to Artistry on ’Nox and rescue Ophiuchus and Mom and Gamba before Aquarius returns from Black Moon—which means we have to go immediately.
It turns out Ezra already sent Hysan the blueprints for the black bullet-ships, and he upgraded ’Nox’s engine to equal their speed—plus, given that the Libran Talisman is built into its brain, Equinox has the only Psy shield that stands a chance against Aquarius. Hysan shared the master’s engine designs with every House, so hopefully our whole fleet will be able to match the Marad’s speed. Once we have Ophiuchus, we’ll Veil from the Psy and hide him on Equinox until the Zodai have defeated Aquarius.
Hysan, Mathias, Nishi, Pandora, Skarlet, Ezra, Gyzer, and I board ’Nox. Since we’ll be leaving Leo with three more people onboard, we’re pushing ’Nox’s oxygen limits, but Hysan assured us that it would be okay. I go straight to my usual cabin, but I stop before turning the handle. Last time I slept in there, Stan was with me.
I look down the hall to see that Nishi is doing the same thing. Her old room is haunted by Deke’s holo-ghost.
Mathias and Hysan are watching us.
“Why don’t you both take my cabin?” says Hysan, and without waiting for our answer, he carries his things into the last and smallest room, the one near the storage hold, and shuts his door.
Nishi and I look at each other, and we wordlessly slip inside the main cabin. When we’re alone, she just stares at me. Even though she’s furious, I can’t help feeling relieved that she looks so much more like herself now than she did on Leo.
“You Cancrians will be the end of me.”
“I’m sorry, Nish.”
She shakes her head and exhales. “The Marad soldiers let me call my parents from the ship, as long as I didn’t disclose any details of what had happened. I figured they must have been going through their own nightmares over my disappearance. But when my mom answered, she and my dad were wasted at some party on Taurus. They thought I was traveling and had no idea anything was wrong.”
She rests a hand on my shoulder and squeezes me hard. “I hate what you did, Rho. But I love why you did it.”
I pull her into a hug, and as I hold her tightly to me, I’m just happy for this moment to be with her. I have no idea what will happen when we try to break out Ophiuchus. Nor do I know how we’re going to keep him hidden from Aquarius now that I’ve given up the only secret location in the Zodiac. But I can’t take another breath without her forgiveness.
“I’m so sorry, Nishi,” I repeat.
“I know,” she says as we pull away, and our fingers link together. “But I almost lost you.”
“I almost lost me, too.”
The ship begins its ascent, and we lie back on the bed, still holding hands, and stare up at the ceiling as we exit Phaet’s atmosphere. From our silence and labored breathing, I know we’re both thinking of the last time we did this, with Deke, right after he asked Nishi to marry him.
“I miss him, Rho.”
“Me too.” I squeeze her hand, and we don’t say anything for a long time.
Unsurprisingly, Nishi breaks the silence with an annoying question. “So what’s going on with you and Hysan?”
“Nothing.”
“He seems heartbroken.”
Skarlet’s face flashes in my mind, and I wonder if even now, in a different cabin, she’s making her move. “He’ll find someone new.”
“So you’re over him?” She rolls onto her side to face me, and half her face is buried in the mattress. All I can see is one slanted amber eye and strands of dark hair.
“I can’t think about him right now,” I say, rolling to my side to face her, too. “I just want to focus on saving the universe.”
Her lips curl into a smirk, and her eye grows smaller. “That should be your anthem. Introducing the Zodiac’s Wandering Star”—her voice goes higher and becomes musical—“She’s not here to date, she’s here to save the Zod-i-ac!”
I shrug. “I kind of prefer Trust in Guardian Rho.”
Her gaze is glassy and her smile wilts. “I wrote the new lyrics the same night you took off to Gemini to warn them about Ophiuchus, right after that meeting with your Advisors.”
“What happened afterwards?” I whisper.
“A lot seemed to happen simultaneously. As soon as the song and your story got out, we received requests from schools everywhere asking us to come perform. We jumped on the chance to take a chartered trip to the Zodai University on Capricorn because its students have the highest test scores of any school in the Zodiac, so I figured they’d lend us the most credibility.”
“I remember seeing something about it in the newsfeeds on Virgo.”
Nishi smiles again, but this time the good humor doesn’t reach her eyes. “Drowning Diamonds’ first and last tour.”
“And you went without your drummer,” I say, trying to lighten the mood.
Her gaze is distant, like she’s reliving the trip, and she says, “That was when Deke finally confessed his feelings.”
“Tell me about it,” I say softly.
“After playing the song onstage, I told the students the lyrics were real. I warned what happened to Cancer would spread unless we came together now, behind you and House Cancer, and united as one Zodiac. The school administration ushered us off the stage pretty fast after that.”
Her voice is low and musical. “Kai went to bed early, but Deke and I decided to explore Tierre’s terrain, and we hiked up a mountain peak where we could see the most varied tapestry of topographies we’d ever seen. The whole horizon was silver, and we took turns pointing out volcanoes and jungles and oceans. Then we lay back and stared up at the stars, and I just knew we were going to sleep out there and not go back to the room, and in that moment I decided that if he didn’t finally own his feelings, I would just kiss him and see what happened. That’s when he said, I’m in love with you, Nish.”
“What?” I ask, my eyes going wide.
“It gets better. Then, he told me that when he watched me speaking in defense of Cancer onstage, he realized how ridiculous he’d been to ever care about our Houses. He said even though we’d been born on different planets, the stars had always meant for us to find each other—that was why they’d given us each one half of the same soul.”
She can’t speak for a while, and neither can I. “I just remember this amazing rush of happiness,” she whispers, “like every House in the Zodiac could explode, and the darkness still wouldn’t be able to touch me. And the thing that scares me most now is never feeling that way again.”
“You will—”
But I give up my weak reassurance when she narrows her eye. We both know the truth. Neither of us will ever be that happy again because that universe is gone.
• • •
I wake up holding Nishi’s hand. I only slept a little—the flight time on the wallscreen says we’ve been traveling for just six hours. But it’s more sleep than I’ve gotten since the Sumber. It’s the first time I’ve felt safe in too long.
Now that I’m up, I’m afraid to close my eyes again, so I decide to stroll through the ship. Everyone is probably still sleeping, so it’s the perfect time to stretch my limbs.
As soon as I’m
in the hall, I hear retching. It sounds like a girl, so it’s Ezra or Pandora or Skarlet. Hoping above all that it’s not the Ariean, I knock on the cabin door. “Are you okay?” I call softly.
No one answers, and I try the handle, which is unlocked, so I peek inside. There’s nobody in the bed, but the lavatory door is open. On the floor is Ezra, curled around the toilet.
I shut the door behind me and come over to her. The lavatories don’t fit two people, so I sit down in the doorway and ask, “What’s going on?”
She groans, and an empty glass bottle rolls away from her on the floor. I pick it up and sniff the lingering licorice scent. “I didn’t think Abyssthe had the same hangover symptoms as alcohol.”
“I always have a . . . reaction to it,” she mumbles into the cold ground.
“Can I get you anything?”
Her groan sounds a lot like the word go.
I keep expecting my feet to push up from the floor and carry me out of the room, but there’s no pull on my muscles to move. “If you’ve got the hangover part covered, maybe I could help with whatever the original problem was—since Abyssthe seems to have failed you?”
“Get out,” she moans, more clearly now.
“Should I call Gyzer instead?”
Her head jerks up, and she winces in pain from the movement. “No,” she says, more pleading than threatening. “Don’t tell him.”
“Okay, but if you’re not going to talk to him about it, then I think you should talk to me. You don’t even want to be my friend anymore, so why should you care what I think? Just use me to extract whatever poison is eating at you because you’re no good to this army if you fall apart.”
“You really have . . . a way with words,” she says, taking a breath midsentence.
“If you’re too nauseous to talk, I’ll wait with you.”
I lean back against the doorframe and shut my eyes, nerves suddenly fluttering in my own belly. We’ve made the calculations, and we’ll be arriving the evening of the third day. Aquarius could be back at any moment.
The plan is for me to return to the Mothership with Ezra and Gyzer by my side and tell Blaze we went to visit my friends so I could convince them, but they wouldn’t budge. I’ll act put out that he and Aquarius never told me Imogen would be taking over the camp, but since I also think my friends are headed to their deaths, I’m probably less angry and more sad. If Blaze wants to verify my story with Imogen, he’ll have to communicate holographically since they have a Psy shield up at the camp, and our fake Imogen will confirm my report.
“I never killed anyone before.”
Ezra’s words hit me like a bullet, and my eyes fly open. Not just from pity, but shock that I didn’t pick up on her pain earlier.
She can’t be older than sixteen. Of course she’s never shot a person.
I edge closer and carefully brush her braids away from her face. There are tears on her mahogany cheek, and I reach up into the wall dispenser for a fresh, warm face towel. When it comes out, I wait for it to cool a little, and then I gently mop up her skin and neck, which is drenched with sweat.
“I didn’t even think of them as human,” she says softly. “I just pictured monsters behind the masks.” Her brown eye rolls up to meet mine. “Risers.”
I nod without saying anything so I don’t interrupt her confession.
“Hysan was right. I didn’t think they were worth saving.” She hinges her elbow beneath her to rise to a sitting position, and I slide back a little to give her space.
“They looked exactly like the targets in the holo-games. . . . They didn’t feel real. I didn’t touch them.”
Tears roll down her cheeks again, and I offer her the towel. She takes it from me and blows her nose. We sit in more silence, until she says, “I thought being a double agent sounded like a dream. Hysan asked me to really think through what this would be like, but I ignored him. I thought I could pretend to be a Party member without losing myself, only . . . now that I’ve killed people, who am I?”
I sigh and say, “I wish I could be helpful, but as you yourself pointed out on the way to Phaet, I don’t have a clue who I am anymore either. I think Eurek was right that we can’t second-guess our choices in war. We have to stay present and keep moving forward. Our worlds may have raised us to think of Risers this way, but it’s now up to us to change the narrative.”
“But the Party members have been able to justify so much death, and I thought—it didn’t seem like it could be that difficult, since they’re not all bad people. A few of them I’m even friends with. How can they be okay with this?”
“I don’t think anyone’s okay with this,” I say, suddenly feeling exhausted and ready to go back to sleep. I stand up and reach down to pull Ezra to her feet, and I help her into bed. As I’m zipping up her cocoon, I whisper, “I think win or lose, war makes victims of us all.”
29
I WAKE UP STARVING.
Nishi’s eyes open a moment after mine do and she says, “I’m hungry.” Someone’s stomach rumbles, and I can’t tell if it’s hers or mine.
We head to the galley to hunt for food or anything that resembles it, and we find Skarlet and Gyzer at the table. A plate stacked with what looks like sheets of brown levlan sits beside them, but they’re completely engrossed in their arm wrestling match. Their faces are tight with concentration, foreheads shiny with sweat, uniform sleeves bulging with muscles.
Skarlet wins.
“Best two out of three?” he asks.
But she looks to me in the entryway and says, “Maybe later.” Then she rises from her seat in one sinuous movement and knocks her rock-hard arm into mine as she edges past. I bite down on my lip to keep quiet.
Nishi approaches the levlan-like food and sniffs it. “What is it?” she asks Gyzer.
“Dried Ram meat. An ancient warrior recipe that Majors would take with them to battle. It’s good,” he adds, seeing Nishi’s suspicious expression.
She lifts a sheet with both hands and brings a corner to her mouth and nibbles it. She chews a few times, frowns, swallows, and then her eyes grow wide. “Mmmm!”
She bites into it more eagerly now, and I reach for a square of my own. It has a hard, rubbery texture, and a smoky, spicy taste, and it’s absolutely delicious.
“I’m going to check on Ezra,” says Gyzer, standing up.
“Is she okay?” I ask, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist.
“She had a headache last night, so she didn’t sleep much. Going to see if she liked the Ariean food.”
When he leaves, Pandora strides in. “Mathias has just taken over the controls, so Hysan returned to his cabin,” she says, like it’s a normal way to greet people.
“Great,” I say, shrugging and ripping off another bite.
“Hysan is alone,” Pandora goes on, sitting across from me and picking up a sheet for herself. “Maybe you want to talk to him and clear the air?”
Nishi frowns at her. “Hey, lavender eyes—if I thought being direct would work, don’t you think I would have tried it?”
“Sorry,” says Pandora, daintily covering her mouth with a hand as she chews.
“I’ve known her for a third of our lives, so take it from me,” Nishi goes on, still talking about me like I’m not here. “She has to choose to leave her shell on her own—if you try to reach inside to pull her out, she’ll only burrow deeper.”
“Since you clearly don’t need me here for this conversation, I’m going to wash up,” I say, stuffing what’s left of my meal into my mouth and heading out into the hall. But rather than tunneling to the back of the ship, where I could run into Hysan, I visit the nose.
Mathias must hear my footsteps when I cross into the front of the ship, because he looks back from the control helm and catches my eye.
“Rho.” His voice is musical, and since he seems pleased to see me, my s
tomach relaxes. “How are you?”
“Finally slept,” I say, sitting next to him at the helm and trying not to think of all the previous pilots I’ve sat beside in this chair.
“I’m glad,” he says warmly, but his kindness only makes my guilt feel more pronounced.
“Mathias . . . aren’t you mad at me? I betrayed you and everyone else who believed in me. I broke out Ochus, I didn’t trust you guys with my plans, I even changed allegiances—”
“But look at where you’re sitting now,” he says, his baritone voice as soothing as ever. “Whatever happened, whatever you did—you never gave up on us. Even when you thought you’d changed sides, you still came back for us.”
“But I—I gave up an ancient Ariean secret, I traded Gamba for Nishi, I—”
“You made sacrifices for us, ones that only you could make,” he says, his tone still lacking judgment. “No one in Zodiac history has ever been put in a position remotely similar to yours, so none of us can know what it’s like to be you. It wouldn’t be right to judge.”
Something shifts in my chest, and I have to open my mouth to pull in air. “How is it you can always forgive me?” I breathe.
For shutting the airlock door. For choosing Hysan. For keeping secrets.
“Because by now I’ve accepted that I’m just stuck with you in my life,” he says, and when I meet his gaze again, I see that he’s smiling.
“I think that’s the second joke I’ve ever heard you make.”
His brow wings up. “You’re keeping count?” he teases.
I give him a small grin, and I notice the line that cuts down his neck and disappears beneath his collar is less striking. It seems to have faded a little. The sight of his scar sends me plummeting back to the Sumber, and my grin starts to feel forced as I remember the Mathias I met in my nightmares. “So when did you and Hysan start getting along so well?”
“It was something your brother told us on the way to Pisces,” he says, his expression dampening. “He told me and Hysan that if we really cared about you, we’d put the petty stuff aside and get along.”